‘TRUST YOUR TASTE’ WINS THE CHALLENGE AND GAINS THE TRUST OF CONSUMERS AND PROFESSIONALS
The project was ambitious, but today ASSICA can claim to have fully met the challenge: “Trust Your Taste, Choose European Quality” closes its first 3 years of activity with an extraordinary balance, both in terms of numbers achieved and effectiveness.
The main messages of “Trust Your Taste, Choose European Quality” were the safety of production systems, nutritional values, sustainability, animal welfare and the growing attention that operators in the sector are dedicating to these issues and, more generally, to quality. This is a summary of the results:
– 16 seminars and educational courses held for the benefit of over 800 operators and companies for a total of more than 20 hours of training and an equal number of expert lecturers involved to address the key issues of sustainable development and innovation.- a Video Academy – an articulated e-learning path consisting of nine training videos for operators – focused on key topics for the sector and reaching over 300,000 professionals (https://www.trustyourtaste.eu/per-gli-operatori/e-online-lacademy-di-trust-your-taste/).
– about 20 million people reached in each year, in Italy and Belgium, with the dissemination and information activities, on-line and in traditional media
– a You Tube channel with about 500 subscribers and 12 video recipes dedicated to enhancing the value of pork and cured meats also in an ‘anti-waste’ key, which gathered more than 400,000 total views and about 25,000 average views (https://www.trustyourtaste.eu/category/per-i-consumatori/video-consumatori/)
– more than 66,000 people met during the promotional activities in 183 Italian delicatessen and butcher shops, also an opportunity to reaffirm the role of the delicatessen producer as a professional figure guarantor of the quality of the raw material and ally of the consumer.
The numbers of www.trustyourtaste.eu are even more extraordinary if we consider the exceptional conditions that have affected the supply chain recently, from the increase in production costs, which has weighed particularly heavily on charcuterie companies, to the African swine fever emergency and its consequences on exports and the sector’s reputation. “As ASSICA we have responded by promoting a growing sustainability of the sector, without neglecting actions capable of increasing consumer awareness, such as the commitment to fight food waste,” continues Calderone. “The Trust Your Taste project has been and will continue to be – thanks also to the support of the European Union – a fundamental part of this strategy and also an important litmus test to understand the responses of operators and consumers in real time.
Consumers reaffirmed their appreciation for Italian pork and cured meats: in the period January-November 2023, according to Assica processing of ISTAT data, exports of Italian cured meats grew, reaching 190,880 tons for a turnover of 1,976.4 million euros, registering +7% in quantity and +9.5% in value. In Belgium, the target country of the project (in addition to Italy), in the period January-November 2023 exports of Italian deli meats reached 9,337 tons for a value of 109.8 million Euro, recording +13.1% in volume and +9.8% in value. Both in volume and value, the result for the first 11 months of 2023 exceeds that of the whole of 2022.
